Virginia Commonwealth University VCU Scholars Compass Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2019 The Wild Beasts Peter Cochrane Virginia Commonwealth University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd Part of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons, Art Practice Commons, Contemporary Art Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Painting Commons, Photography Commons, Sculpture Commons, and the Theory and Criticism Commons © The Author Downloaded from https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/5917 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at VCU Scholars Compass. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of VCU Scholars Compass. For more information, please contact [email protected]. © Peter Cochrane 2019 All Rights Reserved 1 The Wild Beasts A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. By Peter Cochrane Master of Fine Art Photography + Film Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts 2019 Directors Justin James Reed Assistant Professor Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts Department of Photography + Film Sonali Gulati Full Professor Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts Department of Photography + Film Aaron McIntosh Assistant Professor, Fiber Area Head Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts Department of Craft / Material Studies Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, Virginia 2019 2 Acknowledgments Thank you to the Photography + Film department—and to David Riley and Evie Metz, my powerful and steadfast peers—for your guidance and support. I flew across the country within a cloud of uncertainty and in time you helped me untwist the knots of doubt and fear and shame. Coming here has been the best choice I have made for my Self. Thank you to my fathers and my mothers in all of their shapes. Thank you Katie, you are my soul. Thank you Teddy, you are the only one who will ever truly know. I feel less alone by simply conjuring you in my mind. Thank you to the parents who adopted me along the way. It didn’t just take a village, it took a web of cherished adults who called me their own and filled in the gaps. Thank you to my loves in San Francisco. I still cry when a song comes on that says its name because you’re there, you shaped me, and I miss you terribly every single day. Thank you Cathy Conheim for helping me to see my hands for the first time. Thank you John Feeney for helping me walk into the unknown and find my footing there. Stephanie, Scott, trish, Kel, Marie, Hannah, Taylor, and Cheena—how would I have ever made it through without you? Thank you to the undergraduates in Queer Imagery. You are why I do this at all. Thank you to the wild beasts who were the first to participate (and to all those to come): Aaron, you have shown me radical kindness and belief in my capabilities I wouldn’t know how to repay if I tried. Catherine, you have been a rock in my adulthood, a person of great depth, warmth, forgiveness, and compassion—your support was the first that helped me believe I could be an artist. Jess, my spoken and unspoken foundation, my encompassing light, my guide, my sister—thank you for all of the nights spent around a table and texts and phone calls from across the globe that make it all make sense. Michael, how special that we shared this odd and powerful graduate time of transformation together, and how lucky I feel that you’ve been there for me the whole way and before. Taylor, living across the Bay all that time just an arm’s reach away, it is both surreal and makes perfect sense that we found each other here and I was always grateful for the knowing glances and queer solidarity through every single thing. Théo, you helped me believe in myself as a peer and as a friend and I am so grateful that we met and cherish every conversation—this is only the beginning. Thank you Justin James Reed for seeing a grain and helping grow it into a field. Your guidance and patience with me as I worked through “not being a photographer” is mentorship defined. To Sonali Gulati, for whom I have too many words and none at all as some forms of respect cannot be defined. I would not stand as tall or as sure as I do today had you not walked into my world, as I was full of doubt before. You saw me, you heard me, you understood. It’s quite simple really: you changed everything. Meeting you has been a gift I will always cherish. And thank you to The Group, my first family. Nineteen years and on. To friendship and love! 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction: Uncovering the Path II. Becoming and Unbecoming Cerberus III. On Loneliness: Finding the Self through Mythology, History, and the Internet IV. Queer Oppression, Queer Imprisonment, Queer Murder V. The Colonialism of the Camera VI. The Wild Beasts 4 LIST OF FIGURES 1. Derek Jarman’s home in Dungeness, England. 8 2. Peter Cochrane, Osiris (08), porcelain, gold lacquer, 2015. 14 3. Peter Cochrane, Osiris (installation), 2015. 14 4. Eugène Atget, Versailles (Faune), albumen print, 1901. 16 5. Body in Pompeii from the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. 19 6. Peter Cochrane, From Blood to Lust (On Back), archival pigment print, 2017. 19 7. Sonali Gulati, I Am (still image), Directed by Sonali Gulati, 2011. 21 8. David Benjamin Sherry, Winter Storm in Zion Canyon, Zion, Utah, 2013. 24 9. Hans Bollongier, Floral Still Life, oil on panel. 1639. 26 10. Peter Cochrane, For Catherine, archival pigment print, 40”x50”, 2019. 28 11. Peter Cochrane, For Michael, archival pigment print, 40”x50”, 2019. 29 12. Peter Cochrane, For Taylor, archival pigment print, 40”x50”, 2019. 30 13. Peter Cochrane, For Théo, archival pigment print, 40”x50”, 2019. 31 14. Peter Cochrane, For Aaron, archival pigment print, 40”x50”, 2019. 32 15. Peter Cochrane, For Jess, archival pigment print, 40”x50”, 2019. 33 16. Peter Cochrane, The Wild Beasts (installation view), 2019. 34 17. Peter Cochrane, The Wild Beasts (installation view), 2019. 34 18. Peter Cochrane, For Aaron_, archival pigment print, 60”x40”, 2019. 35 19. Peter Cochrane, For Catherine_, archival pigment print, 60”x40”, 2019. 35 20. Peter Cochrane, For Jess_, archival pigment print, 60”x40”, 2019. 36 21. Peter Cochrane, For Michael_, archival pigment print, 60”x40”, 2019. 36 5 Abstract THE WILD BEASTS By Peter Cochrane A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019. Major Director Paul Thulin Graduate Director and Assistant Professor Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts Department of Photography + Film The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to the use of Nature against queer people in most legal systems across the planet. We are deemed unnatural and made criminals through inequitable semantics. The 8x10 negative becomes a portrait, a darkroom contact print that is gifted to each of The Wild Beasts, an intimate artifact of my gratitude. At these borders I lash at the histories of oppression, remaking these lineages and tools into spaces for empathy, tenderness, and love. 6 I. Introduction: Uncovering the Path I come to the creation of The Wild Beasts through an arduous journey from deep psychosocial isolation to empathic connectivity between an ever growing queer chosen family. Like a spider connecting one thread from its spinnerets—so anatomically close that they could be mistaken for the anus—to another to create one of the strongest bonds known to exist on our planet,1 this project comes from my desire to make visible the metaphysical. The defining traits of a relationship are shifting if not imperceptible altogether. A relationship is a taciturn shadow, something we bring into existence through an interchange of words in an attempt to convey a shared experience with another. But it cannot manifest in a way that satisfies our desire to name, to bear witness to, or to know. Relationships are our lifeblood as social creatures. We strive for the essence of our beings to be understood if only by one other person, or we give up the effort and remove ourselves from society. Henry David Thoreau writes about the internal solidification of the Self through isolation and communion with Nature in Walden, yet is the act of writing not an attempt to synthesize our thoughts so they may be understood by another? We keep diaries to catalogue previous systems of reality, and when we die our secrets are inherited by family. Depending on others’ interest in our lives and our work, these sections are even published into bound volumes and sold by the millions. One artist archetype is that of the hermit.